


everything on Earth

by luna65



Category: The Cars (Band)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Mortality, Soulmates, surreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 09:24:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20691197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luna65/pseuds/luna65
Summary: A friend returns to take Ric home.





	everything on Earth

**Author's Note:**

> A way to process my grief; but I will say that the hallucinations, if you want to call them that, are not entirely uncommon to those preparing to pass on. There are a few familiar lines, but also a little stanza of my own invention.
> 
> Dedicated to all who might find solace in it...even the one with the crocodile tears.

The hours alone, there were so many of them now, and whatever sound they might hold within those minutes which comprised them, he found himself hearing echoes, broadcasts of a former life. In a movie, whenever someone heard an old song on the radio, it meant the past was coming for them like a vengeful ghost.

But there was nothing of rancor or ire in that warm voice...if he had turned on a radio (what a funny nostalgic thing now, the thought of a radio) and heard futuristic drums, power chords and then...there he was: forever distinctive, richly resonant. A voice which made everyone smile.

“Hello friend,” he might whisper to it as it hung in the air, shimmering.

He knew the finale might be near when he saw him come out of the wall, walk over to the window and look out at the park. “Too much concrete,” his best friend murmured. His voice was the breathless rasp of the end times. Mortality encroaching on that deep vibrancy, the mischievous lilt all but gone. And that was painful, it hurt worse than the aftereffects of the surgery. He said to himself _don’t turn around if you’re not my guy._

And he didn’t. He was waiting for an answer.

“I’ve always loved cities,” he whispered. A long blink, and he was gone.

That face appeared in the midst of one of his doodles. He never had pretensions as regards their aesthetic value - he left that for others to decide, to commodify. It was as sure a sign of automatic writing as any he had ever attempted, watching the news with a resigned distant mourning.

_It’s all going to go on without me, for better **and** worse._

Weariness shot through with hope, that was the process of catching up to entropy.

“You go on too,” he heard, hovering above his right shoulder, the place where he would hear that voice, usually. “We all do.”

“What’s it like?” he whispered. He didn’t want anyone to know that his mind might be finally fragmenting.

“You can’t even imagine it. Remember the best day?”

“You and me, the best day?”

“Yeah.”

“But which one?” He laughed to himself, he thought, but maybe that laughter might also echo, their shared memories a kaleidoscope of moments bright and dark.

“All of them. But it doesn’t hurt anymore, like when you think of it now and you want to cry.”

But the past didn’t make him cry so much as just yearn for what could have been. But maybe they were never meant to grow old together...however much he would have wanted it, and that was just the way it was.

_There’s always been a great divide that’s never going to liquefy._

And now, what was dropping away, was it the present? Leading to the forever Now wherein everything that was everything existed?

I can see you now, what does that mean?

He didn’t say it, was afraid the ineffable might have an answer...and it’s nothing no one ever really wants to know.

Days swirling the drain, he tried not to think of it that way. His still-agile mind seeking an equanimity which was more than a facade but less than a surety.

He doodled in shades of red and black and white...that classic color scheme for their master plan. Maybe the past was coming back around. And if it was only **that** part of it, that charmed decade, that was okay.

The light outside was changing, turning gold around the edges. Autumn was coming and he wasn’t ready for it, never was. A summer boy, always. **They** were: a wide road, a dimly-lit room full of expectant desires and smoke, a future unspooling before them, unknown.

The light outside was inside, and there he was again, transparent but visible. Standing in a shaft of sunlight, dust motes tumbling through him. Gold gold gold.

_Night screams and rainbows_...exactly. The sublime and terrifying.

If this was the end, then that’s what it was like. Mystery disrobing, but also just as easy as closing your eyes. Darkness, silence, an end to the clamor.

“What -” he began to ask, but the other shook his head.

“Not yet.”

“You always did have a sense of drama,” he muttered when he saw him in the television. Expected him to climb out but he just smiled. He appeared in every show, observing the actions and dialog of those others onscreen. “Fuck, this is just nutty.”

“Didya really think it was gonna be any other way?”

_I live with absurdity, it's always warm and runny._

“Now’s your chance, to tell me everything you wanted to tell me. Even when you wanted to but you couldn’t.”

“But we’re gonna have forever, aren’t we?”

He could see his face, then. Those heartbreaking angles, half angel and half smirking imp of mischief.

“Forever isn’t as long as you think it is.”

What was there to say, now?

“Everything I ever said before, it was still true.”

“The things we don’t let ourselves believe, they’re what’s really true.”

He nodded at the rightness of it. Sipping bland soup and measuring the hour by breaths, he was comforted by whatever this was. He thought _Is it really you?_ then waited. The answer was that stare, those eyes. He thought of how people misheard a particular line..._that shocking innocence_. No, it was the weight of the stare, it was electric enticement. To view those eyes was to be shocked into a new world, one in which you would never forget that face.

He kept quiet and calm, he never said _look who’s here now_. He said: “I’m okay.”

But everything hurt. Pain piles up in a life. Try to bury it beneath everything else but knowing it is there is enough to evoke it.

Eyes fluttering...beyond the window the genteel mellow glow of their pristine neighborhood. Beyond that, lights which blazed against fathomless dark, middle of the night, the best time for his ponderings, for laughter, for truth.

A bright panoply upon the screen, the television kept on continually at a murmur, comforting to a desire for continuity.

_All I want is the same old world_  
_when I wake up._  
_All I want is the same old whirl_  
_that held me up_  
_and took me ‘round._  
_And when it bottomed out_  
_there was never a doubt_  
_that the ride is worth it._

What was this? When the sound was barely audible it was amusing to see if he could figure out whatever he was being shown. Some big-budget glittering production. The gilded age...ah yes, that tragic figure of a malaise so elegantly portrayed. He remembered reading Fitzgerald and pining for that sense of impossible romance. He had been such a romantic in all ways.

Gatsby and Daisy danced upon the exquisite parquet floor of his ballroom and she said, “I wish I could have done everything on Earth with you. All my life, I wish it could always be like this.”

He put his lips to her ear and replied, “It will be.”

Was there anything more beautiful, and more tragic, than a lover’s promise?

“We did a lot of things, didn’t we?” he whispered. And he heard distant laughter. Folly...to quest for the ambivalent heart of a generation, but they did it. He knew that much.

The lovers swayed on, whether in knowledge or ignorance of the coming tragedy it mattered not.

Was he dreaming? He had to be - it was so long ago, just the two of them upon a rickety stage, their voices blending and their fates yearning for transformation. And yet, just in that moment, just in that space...it was all okay. They were meant to be.

He blinked and beheld the constant of his life. Gold gold gold. Silver by the light of the Harvest Moon. Blue eyes glowing, a genuine smile full of belief for what they were, what they would be. He was holding out his hand. The tables had turned, and now he was the one trusting the destination.

“Now?”

“Now, if you’re ready. Are you ready? Have you missed me?”

“What a silly question -”

All the questions of the world ridiculous, of course, but no less needful of an answer.

He reached out even as it all fell away. And what followed was everything, forever.


End file.
